1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a method for rendering a terrain, and more particularly, to a method for rendering a multi-resolution terrain using GPU tessellation.
2. Description of the Related Art
Terrain rendering is used in various fields including a geographic information system (GIS), a flight simulation, an interactive computer game, and the like. As a method for the terrain rendering, a triangular mesh or other polygonal models are commonly used.
Since the size of a capacity of geographic information data required for the terrain rendering is very large, from hundreds of GB to tens of TB, techniques capable of rendering the geographic information data by simplifying a mesh based on a viewpoint of a user and a curve of a surface need to be applied in order to render the geographic information data in real time. As a related prior document, Korean Patent Registration No. 10-0726031 is provided.
The terrain rendering techniques can be generally classified into two groups. A first group is a group using a regular hierarchical structure and the a most representative example is hierarchies of right triangles (HRT). A second group is triangulated irregular networks (TINs). Since the TINs can unevenly sample a terrain, the number of unnecessary triangles can be minimized, but a complicated calculation and a larger storage space are required to achieve multi-resolution.
Therefore, recently, a research into the terrain rendering technique for efficiently achieving the multi-resolution has been demanded.